Posts in 2025

Taking Rich Screenshots with Wezterm

When working on this site, I’ve often wanted to include a screenshot or two. But since git doesn’t work well with binary files and I don’t want to have to deal with media hosting I’ve tended to shy away from it.

However, a lot of what I want to take a screenshot of can be rendered in a terminal.

Which is suddenly quite interesting as a terminal’s contents can be entirely described in plain(-ish) text. Surely it must be possible to capture the contents of a terminal window and then render it as some kind of image? Perhaps an SVG?

M-x pdb |*gud-test*        x                                 [37%] 15:41 21/06/25 ☰ -> if not state.headers_complete:                                           (Pdb)  > /var/home/alex/Projects/swyddfa/lsp-devtools/develop/lib/lsp-devtools/ls\ p_devtools/agent/server.py(166)feed()                                       -> if (idx := state.buffer.find(SEP)) == -1:                                (Pdb)  > /var/home/alex/Projects/swyddfa/lsp-devtools/develop/lib/lsp-devtools/ls\ p_devtools/agent/server.py(169)feed()                                       -> line, state.buffer = state.buffer[:idx], state.buffer[idx + len(SEP) :]  (Pdb) idx 30                                                                          (Pdb)  -  *gud-test* 25:6      (Debugger:run Apheleia)                             +  158 # messages to be stuck in the buffer... +  159 # +  160 # So we will keep running that parser as long as the buffe\ r continues toshrink +  161 previous_length = len(state.buffer) + 1                     +  162 whilelen(state.buffer) < previous_length:                  +  163 previous_length = len(state.buffer)                     +  164 breakpoint()                                            +  165 ifnot state.headers_complete:                          +  166 if (idx := state.buffer.find(SEP)) == -1:           +  167 return +  168  + =>169 line, state.buffer = state.buffer[:idx], state.buf\ -🖿 lsp-devtools server.py 169:0      (Python Flymake[001] ws Apheleia© 

Yes it is!

In this blog post I describe how I arrived at the workflow I used to include the above screenshot on this website.

Blogging with Sphinx and denote.el

If you have spent any time following the Emacs community, you will have likely come across the denote.el project. denote.el defines a clever file-naming scheme and provides an associated Emacs package containing utilities for managing files which follow this naming scheme.

In this blog post I outline how I have adopted denote.el to manage the content on this site and how I’ve extended Sphinx to take advantage this.

Intstalling Emacs with systemd-sysext

One issue with building Emacs from source, or more specifically my hack to ensure that the required system libraries are available on Aurora, is that in some situations the system version of Emacs “wins”.

For example, I wanted to experiment with running the Emacs daemon through systemd:

$ systemctl --user start emacs

Which failed to load my config correctly. It was only after a closer look did I realise that despite specifying the --user flag, systemd was defaulting to the emacs.service file provided by the system emacs package in /usr/... and was therefore running Emacs v29 and not my v30 build.

But then I stumbled across systemd-sysext

TIL: Debugging go programs with gdb

 
$ gdb --args podman info
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/podman info
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
...
WARN[0000] Found incomplete layer "6748b9a4e6f2d75763acd0d8351dfb92d4281a0b3546cc68042fb8cb5e1b7c3c", deleting it

Thread 9 "podman" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 0x7fbacbfff6c0 (LWP 10496)]
Downloading source file /usr/src/debug/podman-5.3.1-1.fc41.x86_64/vendor/github.com/containers/storage/layers.go
github.com/containers/storage.(*layerStore).load (r=0xc00024c140, lockedForWriting=true, ~r0=<optimized out>, ~r0=<optimized out>, ~r1=..., ~r1=...) at /usr/src/debug/podman-5.3.1-1.fc41.x86_64/vendor/github.com/containers/storage/layers.go:917
917                     if layer.Flags == nil {

<Freeze frame, record scratch>

You might be wondering how I got here…

And no, I wasn’t trying to work on podman!